A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Translation/Interpreting, 2017 / This is a linguistic investigation of English and Shona consecutively-interpreted rape trials heard in selected Regional Magistrates’ courts in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean magistrates’ courts can be regarded as a special context because, in most trials, the court officials in an English-medium trial also speak the language(s) of the accused/witness, although they conduct the trial in the language of the court, i.e. English. In such a unique context, the interpreter is not the only bilingual participant. This is unlike many other bilingual settings where court officials do not speak the language of the accused/witness. Specifically, the study investigates the contention between, on the one hand, the impression of the role of the interpreter as a translating device, reflected in court interpreters’ guidelines in Zimbabwe and, on the other hand, the reality of the interpreting situation. Focusing on the effect of additions and omissions on source language utterances, the study employs an interdisciplinary approach which draws from interpreting studies approaches, discourse analytic approaches and corpus-based interpreting studies to investigate interpreted courtroom discourse. The main source of data is question/answer transcripts of consecutively-interpreted rape trials heard at two regional magistrates’ courts in Zimbabwe, making the study principally linguistic although it employs aspects of ethnography. Data from transcripts were supplemented by 92 hours of observation of open court proceedings and structured and semi-structured interviews with court interpreters, magistrates and public prosecutors. The findings presented in this study reveal that, because court interpreters are mindful that their primary goal is to ensure that participants fully understand each other’s communicative intentions, they adopt a strategy for conveying renditions which would ensure that a speaker’s communicative motive, and not only his/her actual words, is available to an end receipient. The resultant interpreted discourse thus reveals some additions and omissions which may impact on the propositional content and style of the source language message. It is possible to argue that the interpreters included these elements based on their intuitive reasoning. The study therefore argues that the presence of additions and omissions in the interpreters’ renditions could be explained in terms of court interpreters’ awareness of the importance of pragmatics and context. In this way, the interpreters’ renditions, as confirmed by my findings, support the expectation that court interpreters are always mindful of the need to convey the speakers’ meaning in full. The study therefore makes a special contribution, from an African point of view, to the debate on interpreters’ role perception by advocating a move towards a more holistic account of dialogue interpreting encounters in which all features are taken into account so that the interpreter’s role is better appreciated. The recommendations the study makes on how various stakeholders can work with interpreters will ultimately enhance the quality of interpreting service provision to ensure that the rights of the people for whom they interpret are safeguarded. Although the findings of this study are based on data from Zimbabwean courtrooms, many of the issues raised in this study would be of interest to other interpreter-mediated courtrooms. / XL2018

In Zimbabwe, translation studies is yet to be recognized as a discipline worthy of study in its own right, hence, not much research has been carried out into the theory and practice of translation. Furthermore, there is no tertiary institution that offers professional translation courses. In light of this information most translations are carried out by untrained/partially trained translators with only a few translators who have gained experience over time. The aim of this study was to investigate strategies used by Ndebele translators in the translation of specialized terms and cultural taboos in selected HIV/AIDS texts, as well as factors that can be used to improve the translation situation of Zimbabwe. Three main theoretical approaches were used in a complementary fashion, namely Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), Cultural Studies and Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS). DTS provided the researcher with a theory to understand the Ndebele translations in their wider environment; Cultural Studies provided the researcher with the means by which to understand Ndebele culture and taboos; Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) provided the researcher with the methodological tools and analytical techniques to analyse the corpus of texts. An English-Ndebele Parallel Corpus (ENPC) was created using fourteen English source texts and their corresponding Ndebele translations. The ENPC was interrogated by means of ParaConc, a parallel concordancing program. The study found that when translating specialised terms, Ndebele translators used strategies such as a general or neutral word, cultural substitution, paraphrasing and omission. The strategy of omission was misused in most cases because Ndebele translators omitted valuable information which did not reach the target readers. With regards to translation strategies that contributed to term creation, it was found that Ndebele translators relied on external as well as internal resources. The translators used strategies such as pure loan words; pure loan words preceeded by an explanation and indigenised loan words. From the Ndebele language itself, the translators resorted to semantic shift, compounding, coinage and paraphrasing, among others. From the ENPC it is clear that Ndebele translators did manage to transfer the message from English to Ndebele to an extent. However, the ENPC has to be used with caution by other researchers since the translations included in the corpus are full of errors such as misinterpretations of the source texts, mistranslations, incorrect terms and incorrect orthography. This factor points to a dire need to establish translation as an academic discipline and profession in Zimbabwe so as to elevate the quality of translations and offer better translation services to all users.